Incarcerating Japanese Americans

Abstract

day after the Im perial Japanese government's dev astating attack on Pearl Har bor, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, in his war mes sage to Congress, declared that the day of the attack, 7 December 1941, would be which will live in infamy (1). Seventy-four days after the attack, 19 Feb ruary 1942, he issued Execu tive Order 9066, which became the authority for the United States Army to exile nearly 120,000 persons of Japanese birth or ancestry from their homes in California, Oregon, Washington, and other West Coast areas and coop them up in what the government called assembly centers and relocation centers, but which the president himself called concentration camps (2). Many scholars regard the issuance ofthe order as the date of infamy as far as the Constitution of the United States is concerned, although others would hold that the honor should be reserved for the two decision Mondays in 1943 and 1944, on which the Supreme Court, in effect, held that the wartime incarceration was constitutional. Roosevelt's action was implemented by Congress without a dissenting vote, in the name of military necessity, and it was applauded by the vast majority of Americans. Today, however, it is all but universally regarded in a different light. On 10 August 1988 President Ronald Reagan signed into law the Civil Liberties Act of 1988. It provided an unprecedented apology to the survivors of the wartime incarceration and authorized the payment of twenty thou sand dollars to each of them (3). presidential com mission investigating the in carceration in the early 1980s judged that: The promulgation of Ex ecutive Order 9066 was not justified by military neces sity, and the decisions which followed from it?detention, ending detention and end ing exclusion?were not driven by analysis of military conditions. broad historical causes which shaped these decisions were race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership. Widespread igno rance of Japanese Americans contributed to a policy conceived in haste and executed in an atmosphere of fear and anger at Japan. A grave injustice was done to American citizens and resident aliens of Japanese ancestry who, without individual review or other probative evidence against them, were excluded, removed, and detained by the United States during World War II (4). rest of this essay will attempt to explain what was done to Japanese Americans during the war and, in its conclusion, to raise the troubling question, Could such a thing happen again? When the great Pacific War began in December 1941, there were fewer than three hundred thousand Japanese Americans. More than half of them lived in Hawaii, not yet a state. Although we,. -^^^Mi^^^^K^^^tMBB^^^^ v-JIbB, .J ^'w^PPp^^^l